Refold Approach to Language Learning: Russian ~300-hour update
Progress overview
Total immersion time (including Anki): 314 hours (+ 88 hours since last post).
It’s been about 6 months since my last post (linked here). I was pretty busy during March and April, but have made an effort to be much more consistent with my immersion since early May. I think my comprehension has improved quite a bit due to the improved consistency.
Listening
Total Listening Immersion time: 85 hours (+ 0 hours since last post).
I haven’t done any listening immersion outside of listening along to the Harry Potter audiobooks while I read (more about that below).
Future plans: After I read/listen to a couple more books in the Harry Potter series, I plan on listening to podcasts as well.
Reading
Total Immersion time: 65 hours (+ 44 hours since last post).
At the time of my last post, I was four chapters into the first Harry Potter book. I recently finished reading the third book a couple of days ago. As you can see from the graph below, my reading speed has increased dramatically. It was incredibly slow at first because I had to sound out every word while I read, but I quickly became able to recognize more and more words on sight. Once I got to a decent reading speed, I started listening along to the audiobook (from the YouTube channel @pro100slushai, which I highly recommend) at 0.7x speed. I gradually increased the playback speed over a period of several weeks until about a month ago when I reached 1x speed.
I also gradually increased the amount of time that I spend reading per session. I wanted to make it easy for myself to start building a consistent habit of immersing, so in early May I started with 15 minutes of reading per day. I now usually immerse for 30–45 minutes, though my typical immersion frequency is only 4–5 days per week. I have a perfectionistic tendency where if I know I’m not going to be able to fit in my full 45 minutes of immersion time that day, I feel like I might as well not do any immersion at all. Going forward, I’m going to make an effort to immerse every day, even if that means immersing for only 15 minutes.
Future plans: finish reading (and listening along) to the Harry Potter series. After that, I think I’ll start reading native content with Metro 2033 by Dmitry Glukhovsky.
Anki
Total review time: 163 hours (+ 44 hours since last post)
I’ve been doing quite a bit of sentence mining. I made 466 cards from Harry Potter book 1, 152 cards from book 2, and 134 cards from book 3. I was going pretty hardcore for the first book, but have gradually reduced the intensity over time. Now I usually make a maximum of 5–10 cards per immersion session.
Overall impressions
I’m pretty happy with how much I’ve improved since my last post. My reading speed is now able to keep up with an audiobook, which has made it much more enjoyable. I’ve noticed my comprehension also improving, as I’m able to understand the gist of what is happening most of the time. Every now and then I’ll realize that I understood exactly what was being said for an entire paragraph or two, which has been really exciting! Immersion has become pretty fun, and I don’t feel like I have to force myself to do it anymore. I’m learning that consistency is definitely the key to improving, and I am excited to continue the journey!
